> I think that cross-linguistically, these might be a bit extreme? You’re very probably right, though such ‘extreme’ examples are at least more representative

> I think that cross-linguistically, these might be a bit extreme? You’re very probably right, though such ‘extreme’ examples are at least more representative of world languages than English is. Possibly more representative is something like, say, Jarawara: ee to-ka-haba ee-ke ahi, fare owa teme-ne ite jaa, Boniwa; Boniwa teme-ne ite jaa, ee to-wa-ke-bana-ka But that doesn’t emphasise my point nearly as well. > Also, the languages are head-marking … which is just one of multiple possible ways if encoding grammatical relations. Sure, but dependent-marking languages generally aren’t nearly as agglutinative as head-marking one, which again doesn’t illustrate my point too well. > I guess that many English speakers don't realize how much of an oddball English is as a language (even within European languages, which by themselves have a number of fairly oddball features). I personally like the list of Standard Average European features at https://risteq.net/languages/ https://risteq.net/languages/. And then English is highly isolating on top of that, which in and of itself is fairly uncommon (at least outside SE Asia and W Africa). Personally, I suspect that IE is no weirder than any other language families (TNG and Sino–Tibetan are at least as weird); people just tend to think of it as ‘average’ when it really isn’t. > (I wish there was a "follow" feature here on HN, I really like reading your comments.) Why, thank you! Honestly, I joined HN mostly to talk about programming, but there seem to have been lots of linguistics articles lately, so that’s what I’ve ended up talking about a lot. (There’s a fair bit of XKCD 386 about it, really.) But I post more regularly on linguistics here: https://www.verduria.org/ https://www.verduria.org/ (And IIRC I believe the lack of notifications is intentional, though I don’t know the details.)